Critical Hope and the Political Commitments of Women of Color Graduate Students in STEM

• In Event: Sociology of Education Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 17. The Structure of Academe: Graduate Students, Faculty, and Staff

Abstract

Although scholarship has examined the trajectories of women of color (WOC) in STEM, far less attention has focused on their experiences in graduate education. Drawing on interviews with 30 WOC graduate students in STEM fields, this study examines how they sustain engagement within academic environments shaped by racialized and gendered inequalities. Broadly guided by intersectionality and critical hope frameworks, I analyze how participants make meaning of marginalization and articulate their commitments to change. Findings show that participants described strong commitments to mentoring other minoritized students and to reshaping academic culture. They enacted these commitments by connecting research to community concerns, supporting interdisciplinary perspectives grounded in lived experience, and intentionally creating supportive spaces for students of color. Extending resilience-based explanations of persistence, I conceptualize these practices as enactments of Freire’s (2021) framework of critical hope, a politically conscious orientation that frames graduate education not only as a site of exclusion, but also as a space for intervention and change. By reframing persistence as justice-oriented engagement rather than individual adaptation, this study contributes to sociological understandings of agency, mentoring, and inequality in graduate education..

Author

• Machienvee Villanueva Lammey, TERC